


The One with a Weird Blond Kid

by spellingmynamewrong



Series: The One With the Marauders [1]
Category: Friends (TV), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Friends AU, Gen, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-30 04:18:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11455833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spellingmynamewrong/pseuds/spellingmynamewrong
Summary: In which Sirius and Remus attempt to take care of a child and many people are woken up in dubiously polite fashions.





	The One with a Weird Blond Kid

**Author's Note:**

  * For [howyousay_anarchy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/howyousay_anarchy/gifts).



Remus isn’t sure if he’s dreaming or not. For some reason, there’s a sharp-nosed, little blond boy sitting on their kitchen table -- well, the foosball table, really -- appraising him doubtfully. The boy is dressed in a suit, complete with white bow tie, and is swinging his legs in rhythm to the rock song playing from the apartment upstairs. After looking at the boy again -- who is now also humming along to the song, which seems to be Sting -- Remus decides that yes, he is definitely still dreaming. He resolves to go back to bed and steal the covers from Sirius, who had the privilege of stealing them from Remus two nights ago.

On the way back to bed, though, he bangs his foot on the wall and yelps in pain. Attempting to ignore the throbbing sensation in his big toe, he becomes acutely aware that he is not dreaming. There is, for whatever reason, a boy who looks to be about eight in the apartment that he shares with Sirius and Peter. Remus isn’t even sure how the kid got into the apartment. He’s sure that he locked the door last night.

Suddenly, a thought pops into his mind: Peter. 

Peter, for some reason, is extremely attractive to single mothers. He’s never known Peter to pick up a mother who has her kid along before, but he supposes that such things could happen. He also doesn’t remember Peter bringing anyone back the night before, but Remus had gone to bed at an earlier time than usual. Pivoting on his feet, he heads towards Peter’s still-closed door. 

“Pete?” he asks, turning the doorknob. “You in there?” It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the total darkness of Peter’s room. After a few seconds, he realizes that although Peter is in his room, no one else is there with him. He thinks about checking their bathroom, but it would probably be wiser to ask Peter if he brought anyone home last night first. He still remembers the time that Sirius had walked in on Lily after her shower. Remus also remembers being walked in on by Lily while he had been showering, ostensibly as revenge for Sirius gawking at her in a towel. 

“Pete? Pete? Wake up, Pete,” he says, opening Peter’s spaceship-patterned curtains and letting in the almost-blinding sun. He isn’t sure how Peter manages to keep sleeping even as the sun is shining on his forehead. “Peter. Peter. Peter!”

“Whuzzat,” Peter mumbles, turning over onto his face. 

“Did you bring home a girl last night? Say, a single mom who happened to be blonde?”

“Don’t think I was drunk enough to forget that, no,” Peter replies. “I’m going back to sleep now, ‘kay? Don’t wake me up until the sun’s gone.”

Remus exits Peter’s room, leaving the curtains open, the sun still shining onto Peter’s face. Creeping back to the room that he shares with Sirius, he carefully opens the door before flinging himself onto the bed, and by extension, Sirius’s leg.

“What the hell, man,” Sirius grumbles, trying to shake his leg free. “Is this how guards wake up prisoners in jail?”

“No, Sirius, I don’t think so. Would you mind explaining to me why there’s a child in our kitchen?”

“Maybe it’s the baby of James’s lesbian ex-girlfriend,” Sirius cracks, sitting up and leaning against the carved hazel headboard.

“Both of us know that Neville is two, Sirius. The kid standing in our kitchen is at least seven. He’s also extremely blond.”

“Well, I don’t know, Remus. Maybe Neville drank an aging potion or some shit and got into my cousin’s hair dye. All I know is -- wait, what day is it again?”

“Tuesday, Sirius. And how’d the kid even get in here?”

“Oh, right!” Sirius mimes slapping himself on the forehead before letting his head flop back down onto his pillow. “I told my cousin Cissy that I would look after her kid Draco today. I gave Cissy an extra key because she left a Christmas ham here once and she was like, ‘oh, but if I had a spare key we would have had ham and Auntie Walburga wouldn’t have said I was an unprepared idiot’, blah blah blah, whine whine whine, and I honestly couldn’t stand her whining anymore.”

“She has a ke -- you know, I’m not even going to focus on that part right now. You told her what? Sirius, we are completely unprepared for a child in this apartment. There are porcelain vases on our mantelpiece. Not one porcelain vase, Sirius. Four of them. One is an antique Ming vase James brought back from Beijing. Our kitchen table is literally a foosball table. The only foods we have in our fridge are hot wings and bread-and-butter pickles. There’s literally a stack of dirty laundry sitting in our bathtub! Is this kid even potty-trained?” 

“Your fault for letting James keep his shit here. I’ll concede the table and food points, but we can always go down to The Three Broomsticks and get some danishes there. Lily will come visit sometime, see the dirty laundry, and go into one of her freakish cleaning modes where she screams at us and then throws the laundry into a bin and brings it to the basement to do an intensive washing session. And Draco’s seven, Remus. I’m sure he’s potty-trained. If not, we can always get some diapers from James’s place. His lesbian ex-girlfriend probably left some over there the last time she visited.” Somehow, Sirius manages to deftly rebut all of Remus’s complaints. 

“Alice has a name, Sirius. Why are you still pissed at her?” Remus settles for picking at this point instead. He’s always been pretty good friends with Alice, even if she is James’s lesbian ex-girlfriend. Just calling her “James’s lesbian ex-girlfriend” has always felt a bit demeaning, though, considering that Alice does in fact have a personality outside of her lesbianism. Also, Alice and Francine are probably one of the cutest and most adoring couples that Remus knows. As far as Remus is aware, James and Alice’s relationship was always a bit stilted and uncomfortable, even if James is still in denial about that fact.

“Oh, I’m not. It’s just so much fun reminding myself that James’s longest and only real relationship ended with the girl breaking up with him and telling him that she was a lesbian.” Sirius snickers, sitting up again and stretching. “Look, Remus, I’m sorry. I barely know Draco too.”

“Then why the hell are we his parents for the day?”

“It’s just -- look, I’m not the biggest fan of cousin Cissy either. Her husband, however, is Lucius Malfoy.”

“I thought you hated that guy,” Remus frowns. As a matter of fact, he can clearly remember Sirius once swearing that he would dance on Lucius’s grave and then fling confetti and glitter on top of it. 

“I do hate that guy. That guy sucks. But Lucius is friends with the guy who’s directing the new West End production of Equus.”

“Equus?”

“That play about a guy who loves horses. Like, really loves. Like, uncomfortably loves. Like --”

“I think I get the gist of it, thank you, Sirius,” Remus interrupts. “But so what? Lucius is friends with some rich, important guy, and they do rich, important guy things together, like have tea in weirdly expensive cafes.”

“The auditions to Equus are invitation-only, basically, even if they don’t say it, and Cissy dropped the hint that if I babysat Draco today, she would tell Lucius to put in a good word for me with the director, and I would get an audition, and I really need an audition right now since the last thing I was in is still the venereal disease ad campaign and I saw one of my friends from school yesterday on the tube and the first thing they said to me was, ‘oh, Sirius, I didn’t know that you were suffering from syphilis!’, and so please, Remus, it’s only for one day?” Sirius rushes through the words as if they’re a poorly written script, looking up at Remus with puppy-dog eyes when he’s done. “Please? You barely have to do anything. Just help me keep an eye on the kid. I’ll take care of him and make sure he doesn’t smear his lunch onto our walls and stuff.”

“Fine,” Remus sighs. Try as he might (and he always tries), he can never seem to resist Sirius’s puppy-dog eyes, especially when he pouts at the same time. “You’re buying me coffee for the next two weeks, though.”

“Can’t I pay you back in make-out sessions?” Sirius pleads.

“Nope. You’re going to purchase two vanilla lattes every single day until the end of this month. Now, get out of bed. You have to go take care of the kid. What’s his name again?”

“Draco.”

“What’s with you rich people and your ridiculous names?”

“Oh, like you have any room to talk, Remus Lupin.” Grumbling, Sirius makes his way out of bed, slipping on a robe and sliding his feet into his pink silk slippers. Sirius opens the door, and Remus sees that somehow, the kid is still happily humming away atop the foosball table.

“Hey, little buddy,” Sirius says in a weird, high-pitched voice, crouching down to meet Draco’s eyes. This, Remus thinks, is highly unnecessary, since Draco’s position on the foosball table means that he’s already practically Sirius’s height. 

“Are you my weird, poor cousin that lives in sin in a hellish hipster-esque apartment?” Draco seems to think that this is a perfectly normal inquiry. Even more strangely, Sirius takes the question in stride.

“Your dad’s been ranting about me, huh,” Sirius replies, still using the weird voice. “You’ve grown, little buddy!”

“I’m not your little buddy. I’m seven,” Draco sniffs petulantly. 

“Hey Seven, I’m cousin Sirius!” Sirius seems to find his own joke hilarious, and bursts into laughter. Draco looks extremely uncomfortable.

“And I’m the guy he lives in sin with in this hellish hipster apartment!” Remus interjects, imitating the weird voice. “Isn’t this a happy family!” Remus grabs onto Sirius’s shoulder, steering the both of them into a corner. “Are you sure Lucius is actually going to put in a good word for you? Also, what kind of a family does this kid live in?"

“Look, rich people relations are weird, okay? It’ll work out, I promise. And Draco’s parents love him a lot. Lucius is just a homophobic dick. Just ignore any weirdness that comes out of his mouth; it’s probably from his dad. Draco’s generally a good egg. All we have to do is keep him entertained.”

Remus sighs, and thinks -- no, knows -- that he’s going to regret giving into Sirius’s puppy-dog eyes. 

This thought is completely founded. As it turns out, taking care of a seven-year-old is extremely difficult. 

Firstly, the only foods that Draco will eat are apricots topped with blueberry jam and sunny-side up eggs with runny yolks. Since neither Sirius nor Remus wants to go to the store, they spend an hour trying to make the perfect sunny-side up eggs. At the end, there are about twenty eggs deemed unsatisfactory by Draco, piled on top of each other in a baking tin that will probably be forced upon Lily, James, and Peter in a few hours. Luckily, one good egg is finally made, and Draco eats it happily, sawing into it with the best knife they own. 

Secondly, Draco isn’t a kid that you can just plop down in front of the television and forget about. Draco demands “intellectually-stimulating activities”, and Remus swears that he can hear Sirius mutter curses under his breath. Luckily, the British Museum is open. Draco is apparently perfectly content to spend hours wandering around the Egyptian exhibit, gawking at the Rosetta Stone for at least ten minutes. By four o’clock, though, Draco is visibly hungry and tired, even if he denies it.

They manage to find a small chippy and get takeout, since Sirius whispers to Remus that Draco really does need an afternoon nap, even if he’ll probably try to fight one of them over it. Luckily, Draco crashes when they get back to their flat, falling asleep face-first on the couch. 

“Thank the Lord,” Sirius sighs. “Who knew that taking care of a kid would be so hard?”

“Well, I would say that I knew, but you look pretty tired, and you did take care of him more than I did,” Remus smiles. 

“Thanks,” Sirius snorts. “I’m going to shower, since I think I’m still sweating from those staircase races I had with Draco in that museum.”

Remus yawns involuntarily, closing his eyes for a second. 

“Do you need a nap too?” Sirius asks wryly. “It’s fine if you do. The kid’s probably going to be out for at least two hours.”

“No, I think I --” Remus’s body chooses that time to betray him, and he lets out an even louder yawn. 

“Go. The kid’ll be fine, I’ll be fine, Pete’s still here, probably sleeping. Take a nap.”

Yawning again, Remus sluggishly heads into their room, and collapses onto the bed. He isn’t sure when he falls asleep, but he remembers feeling a soft touch of lips on his forehead.

When he wakes up, it’s to the lack of sunlight and a disturbingly quiet apartment, save for the sound of running water. Frowning, Remus rolls over and looks at the analog clock on their nightstand. Sirius usually takes quick showers, and Remus doesn’t think he took a very quick nap.

Sure enough, it’s already seven o’clock. Remus tries to move his legs, and realizes that there’s a dead weight on them. For a moment, he wonders madly if there had been an earthquake and the wall had collapsed on top of him. After rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, though, he realizes that the weight is Sirius, who’s snoring away on Remus’s thighs. Smiling softly, he moves Sirius’s head off of his legs and onto a pillow. Remus slowly shifts his way out of bed, stealing Sirius’s Manchester United sweatshirt and slipping it on over his head. If Sirius’s isn’t showering, he reasons, it’s probably Peter, finally awoken from his ridiculously long slumber.

Stumbling into the kitchen, he finds a note on the counter. With a start, he realizes that it’s from Peter.

Saw you were asleep, so didn’t want to wake you. The Hot Hat Girl from 14B called back! We’re getting drinks tonight at the Hog’s Head. Don’t wait up for me. Have a nice night w/ Pads. ;)  
\- Pete

Remus chuckles at the drawn-out winky face, silently hoping that Peter has a nice night with Hot Hat Girl. However, his mirth quickly gives way to panic as he realizes that either Sirius forgot to shut off the water, which means that their bill will be ridiculously high this month and the tub is probably overflowing, or Draco is the one in the bathroom. Visions of a drowning Draco fill his head, and Remus almost trips over a chair in a rush to get to the bathroom.

Luckily, Draco is alive, and the tub isn’t overflowing. Unluckily, Draco has his head in the sink, and seems to be rinsing out green hair dye. With a start, Remus realizes that Draco’s blonde hair is now the shade of a dense forest. 

“Hullo,” Draco says, still determinedly rinsing out the dye. “Don’t worry ‘bout me, I’ve seen mummy do this loads of times before, only she does it with the yellow colour.”

In spite of himself, Remus feels a laugh coming on. He knew that Cousin Cissy had been dyeing her hair from the pictures Sirius had showed him, even if Sirius had continuously denied it. 

“Draco, where did you find that dye?” Remus asks in what he hopes is a calm tone.

“Found it on top of that dresser over there. There’s loads of colours, like pink and blue and purple.”

Pink dye. Remus groans. Every time Tonks comes over, she leaves packets of hair dye around in what she probably thinks is a surreptitious fashion, in the hopes that Sirius will finally get around to dyeing his hair pink, ostensibly because Sirius had once promised a ten-year-old Tonks that he would do so. Somehow, Draco has found the packets of dye, and for whatever reason, he’s decided that using the dye is a great idea.

“Draco, why are you dyeing your hair green?”

“‘Cause I felt like it,” Draco shrugs. Internally, Remus sighs. He’d forgotten that a common motivator for children was their own emotions. 

“Draco, how long have you been rinsing your hair out for?” 

“‘Bout an hour. D’ya think I’m done?”

“Yeah, buddy. I think you’re done. I also think you should get a towel and dry off your hair, okay?” Remus makes sure to grab a tattered yellow one, just in case the hair dye Tonks uses has a rinsing-out period of longer than an hour. “I’m going to get Sirius, okay?” And we’re going to have to figure out a way to stop your mother from brutally murdering us.

Draco nods his head yes, and Remus figures that the kid will be fine for five minutes. Of course, he also thought that Draco would stay asleep until his mother came to pick him up, but he ended up being wrong there. He has the feeling that he should make the trip a quick one.

“Sirius?” Remus says, not even bothering to open the door carefully. “How does Cousin Cissy feel about the colour green?”

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I gender-swapped Frank. I really wanted James to fit with the role of Ross, even if James never actually shows up in person in this fic. Sirius is kind of Joey, struggling actor and all. Remus is kind of Chandler (except not really). Peter is also kind of Joey. James, however, is definitely Ross.


End file.
